Christian Believing

Somewhere on my bookshelf is a book produced by the Doctrine Commission of the Church of England back in the ‘80s. The title of the book is Christian Believing. While the content has long since crept from my memory, one of the comments from a review still sticks in my mind. The reviewer pointed out that the Church has come to an interesting point when its Doctrine Commission writes reports not about what Christians believe, but about the act of believing. The subject has switched from God and his action of creation and redemption to the human subject as the one believing. Furthermore, we need to realize how significant this shift of subject is for the very being of the Church.

Big thoughts, these. And I, of course am One Who Thinks Big Thoughts™. But on a much smaller level, the parish church, this shift has had a larger impact than we might think.

All too often when I try to answer what Episcopalians believe I find myself in a default setting of describing the varieties of believing within Anglo-American Anglicanism rather than giving a positive statement about God, the work of redemption, and the life that flows from those affirmations. If positive, normative theological statements are made, sure shooting someone will readily point out plenty of Anglo-American Anglicans who dissent from the normative understanding. The Church that has Kendall Harmon and Philip Turner also has Jack Spong and Marcus Borg.

Orthodoxy has become a personal option for believing, rather than a communal affirmation of God and the economy of salvation. To say I believe in the Trinity says nothing about God, but more about me. What is revealed in my affirmation has perhaps more to do with my Myer-Briggs type than about the One known as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. (“Oh, you’re an NT. No wonder you like the doctrine of the Trinity!”)

(Interestingly enough, this is at the heart of a personal conversation I had with a very well known academic and writer popular in ECUSA. He commented that the doctrine of the Trinity is descriptive of Christian believing. I asked if the Trinity was an objective description of God, and he replied that he would not want to say that.)

Or take the all too prevalent practice in Episcopal congregations where the Rector admonishes communicants to just remain silent during the portions of the creed they cannot believe.

Even in thoroughly “orthodox” parishes what is being affirmed is less than the positive creedal statement as a statement of our belief over and against the prevalent view of other diocesan parishes, “Well, at St. Swithin’s we believe…” Orthodoxy in a parish is simply the aggregate of orthodox choices by the presbyter and the congregation.

As it has been pointed out often, the word heresy is derived from the Greek word meaning “to choose.” From this perspective even orthodoxy in ECUSA is heretical as it refers to a choice rather than to obedience to a common faith.

As I read the above, I wonder if I haven’t set up a red herring. But I do notice a different sort of rhetoric about the faith in the writings of, say, Benedict XVI or John Paul II. They tend to speak of the Faith as an objective reality under which they find themselves rather than an expression of their own subjective experience and epistemology.

I have, of course, more rantings on this topic, but I leave it now to others’ thoughts and critiques.